


Shade Garden

by juvenaldelinquency



Category: Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Corpse Desecration, Cunnilingus, F/F, Group Sex, Lesbians, Object Insertion, Older Woman/Younger Woman, S&M, Shapeshifting, Shoe Kink, Vaginal Fingering, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:08:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27675158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juvenaldelinquency/pseuds/juvenaldelinquency
Summary: Demeter goes for a walk, pets a dog, meets up with a colleague. Well, almost, but not quite.
Relationships: Demeter & Hecate (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12





	Shade Garden

**Author's Note:**

> "Thereafter ... did the Lady Demeter  
> wander all over the earth, holding torches ablaze in her hands.  
> Not once did she take of ambrosia and nectar, sweet to drink,  
> in her grief, nor did she bathe her skin in water.  
> But when the tenth bright dawn came upon her,  
> Hekatê came to her, holding a light ablaze in her hands.  
> She came with a message."
> 
> \--first Homeric hymn to Demeter, translated by Gregory Nagy (https://uh.edu/~cldue/texts/demeter.html)

Demeter allows her footfall to become heavy enough to crack through the crust of snow, heavy enough still to crush the leprous husks of frostbitten wheat beneath. She allows her breath to manifest not as spangling energy but as mere air, curdling with the still-baser air of the mortal plane to create dew that crystallizes into a torrent of snowflakes that she crushes beneath her heel.

In her mind’s eye, the goddess sees the land invaded by ranks of plants wriggling forth from their seeds like spindly grubs, questing little roots scratching at the ground, bursting forth in slatternly blooms to crown whichever spot where Kore’s forgotten corpse is buried. Then all gone to filth and rot, in the end. All those green leaves and riots of color, yielding to decay and cold. What good were her daughter’s tender mercies to these dull little green forms of life, in the end? The land had swallowed her up and was silent. They couldn’t save her, anymore than they could save themselves from the inevitable. She can still hate them for it, though.

This place can never die enough to satisfy her. Not after a thousand ruthless winters. 

The goddess walks through a ghost village. No, not yet a ghost village -- still a corpse village. Ah, yes! She’d twitched back the curtain of winter here just enough to see if some mortals would be foolhardy enough to brave the taboo of this land. Of course they had violated this spot with their drab houses, their piles of excrement, their futile stabs at the cold barren earth. No sense of morals these days. Back when the Titans ruled, the mortals knew how to die quietly and respectfully.

She walks past a herd of cattle standing stiffly in the field, betrayed by their own steaming breath that froze their faces to the ground they’d been fitfully grazing. One red cow without spots, still beautiful under a coat of ice and even after a round of bloat and then desiccation, had small scraps of ribbon and paper tied to its horns. Demeter shucks the prayers off and unspools them. They are the unartful bleating of farmers, no poetry at all:

_Please, great Goddess, we mean no disrespect._

_We wish to make the land fruitiful again and soothe you with worship and praise._

_Perhaps when the flowers bloom again, Kore will return._

Her eyes blaze with white light at the insolence of the last one, and she regrets that she let this blizzard fall on them so quickly. They deserved a much longer death. She raises her hands and great crystals erupt from the earth beneath every frozen corpse, animal and human alike. Ice shatters bone and punches through threadbare, brittle meat, sending the bodies aloft on frozen spikes as they’re ripped from their shallow graves. Now their shades won’t find even the relative peace of a settled existence in Tartarus, but be scattered in flighty scraps fluttering around the borderlands of hell, their memories lost to the howling winds of Chaos.

Demeter is so busy desecrating corpses that she doesn’t notice the black dog approaching until its crunching footfalls are almost right behind her. Its pink tongue lolls obscenely and its eyes are red-rimmed and staring.

“Not now,” says Demeter. 

The bitch sits inelegantly on one haunch, hind legs both splayed off to the side. A ripe stench of fermented corn rises from her. Her nipples are long and withered. She drools. 

“Fine,” the goddess snaps. “But only because I can’t stand the sight of your dirty mouth.” She performs a curious shrug of the shoulders that throws off her heavy cape, but that at the same time rolls white fur across her shoulders and down her body.

Taking animal form is only a little more tiresome than taking a human form. Zeus and her other boorish foster-brothers positively delighted in finding new kinds of cocks to thrust into squealing mortal girls, but Demeter had never found it any more or less thrilling to couple as a goose or deer than as a mostly hairless ape. 

Killing, however, has a certain savor as a wolf. 

She rushes at the black dog and bowls her over. Her bull rush carries her past and she whirls round to see the bitch up and lunging at her low, that obscene pink tongue still lolling. On her quick long legs she lunges aside and lets the heavy bitch topple over into a snowbank face-first. She’s on her in a flash, going not for the back of that thick neck but for the back legs, seizing both and shaking her head ‘til the crack of calving bone sings out. The bitch screams like a goddess faking ecstasy for a pitiful mortal lover. Demeter bites the useless thighs til the black dog rolls over weakly away from her jaws. The winter wolf straddles the bitch and seizes her throat and pulls up and up and up until an arc of quickly frozen blood shatters and falls back on her face in crude snowflakes.

Demeter opens the bitch’s belly with deft and savage bites, then noses in the dog’s innards and withdraws the liver. The wolf makes a curious, very unwolflike shrugging motion, and now she holds the liver in one elegantly lined hand. She slits the organ open with a fingernail and withdraws a key. With an exasperated huff, she thrusts the key into the empty air and turns.

Starry lines draw a simple doorway in the empty air and Demeter steps through. Right ahead, a woman with three faces is squatting on bare rock, scratching a circle into the ground and occasionally looking up at the sky. Artifacts of cold iron and bone are scattered about, and more black dogs prowl at a distance. Hecate the witch-goddess turns her six eyes on Demeter and allows herself a mysterious half-smile, which she knows the wintry goddess hates.

“Must you make me kill Hecuba every time you wish to see me?” the goddess says. 

“Hecuba wants only a small spot of relief from her madness, and I grow tired of poisoning her,” Hecate says in her soft, slightly glottal monotone. “Surely you don’t mind. You do seem to relish it just a bit. Hot blood, not yet frozen, matting your elegant face in gore.” 

Huffily, Demeter ignores the triple goddess and looks for a not completely rough-hewn rock to sit upon. Finding none, she conjures a modest throne of crystal and light and settles upon it. She not-quite-accidentally kicks over one of Hecate’s innumerable cauldrons scattered about and something mottled white and green, bubbling languidly, splashes back to coat the instep of her sandal. “What in the blasted void --”

“Oh, don’t worry, I have plenty of frog cum to spare,” Hecate says, not turning to face her but in a slightly raised monotone that Demeter knows means those six eyes are half-lidded in insolence.

“Clean this off,” the ancient goddess commands.

Hecate turns and ripples, her form contracting from three into one, a young maiden with shorn hair and simple black dress. She approaches Demeter humbly, head bowed, on her knees, every inch a penitent mortal. She takes the older goddess’ ankle delicately in her hands, and licks the filth from her shoe, dragging a bright red tongue across the supple leather in long strokes. Even when it’s fully cleaned she suckles at the faint stain like it will feed her something she desperately needs and is desperately afraid of losing.

“Enough,” Demeter says, kicking Hecate under the chin. The maiden’s head snaps back, and Demeter gets a glimpse of eye sockets crowded with three staring eyes apiece. The witch-goddess ripples again, and the maiden becomes a mature woman heavy with child, with strapping arms and thighs. She again kneels before the goddess.

“What a foul caricature you are. A swelling fruit ready to burst,” Demeter says icily. 

“Didn’t you swell in your own time?” Hecate pillows one soft cheek on the winter-goddess’s lean thigh.

“You say her name and I’ll end this putrid little assignation,” Demeter warns, a genuine spike of ice cutting through. Hecate, used to such things, presses in a slightly different angle. 

“I just want to see what you looked like. You can change as much as I can.”

“It is not a form I particularly relished at the time, and not one I want to indulge in now. And it was hardly anything like this garish little pantomime you’re putting on now.” She seizes one heavy breast in a hand and pulls up harshly, causing Hecate to bolt up to her feet. The other of Demeter’s hands strikes as quick as a serpent and buries two fingers in the witch-goddess’ cunt, up to the second knuckle. She crooks them and Hecate moans and settles down on Demeter’s hand jutting from her lap. She bows over her, head resting on the winter goddess’ shoulder. Demeter whispers harshly into her ear.

“Do you know what happens to them? How their breasts get those wrinkled little dark paths like dirty footsteps on perfect snow?” She licks one of Hecate’s wide dark areola and exhales frost on it, coating it with delicate frozen lace that settles for an instant before the nipple hardens and bursts through, shredding the little cape of Demeter’s frozen breath. The winter goddess breathes more snowflake embroidery on Hecate’s neck, between her collarbones, her shoulders, and the soft rolls between belly and breast, watching as goosepimples rise up and melt her kisses away. She slips a third and then a fourth finger into the throbbing, drooling mouth between the witch-goddess’ legs, mouth twisting as her fingers grow obscenely warm and slick. She places her other hand on Hecate’s shoulder, delicately stabilizing the motherformed goddess as she closes her eyes and begins to rock back and forth on Demeter’s hand, grinding the unyielding godly flesh at the start and end of each stroke, her mouth and eyelids fluttering in time.

Conversationally, Demeter adds: “Did you know that their insides heave up and crush against their backs?” With those words, she cups the hand inside the cunt and thrusts up with divine strength while bearing down on Hecate’s shoulder with the other, punching past that smaller squirming gate and into the witch’s pantomime womb. She opens her fingers and wills ice to grow and grow inside Hecate, swelling her body up and up until she is so full it pushes Demeter’s own hand out of the witchcunt and the other goddess topples on her back and lies there, breathing heavy, as slush laced with bloody mucus begins to trickle from her twitching nethers in a slow tide.

After a long wait, the wintry goddess frowns. “Don’t bother with your third act. I don’t need it.” 

She rises to go, and turns. But Hecate is already where she turns to, always has been -- she looks out every way with her three faces. Robed in loose black linen, in this form her skin hangs loose from everywhere -- those crowded eyes dripping with extra lids below, her mouth adorned with two little flags of jowl. Her breasts are still heavy, but now precipitously pendulous, like apples ready to drop to the ground. 

“You have such a stiff idea of age,” the old crone Hecate says, drawing the curtains of her face back to flash that half-smile Demeter hates. “Something frozen and dry. Unchanging. My version is a little more… organic.”

Demeter scoffs. “At least I have the decency to embrace a somewhat more dignified form, rather than being obsessed with looking a vacuous stripling like my foster-siblings. And how DARE you lecture me, you thrice-damned fortuneteller! Is this the face you present to your dark young worshippers, panting for charms and ensorcelled trinkets? I think not. What good is your cronedom if you largely keep it veiled and out of sight?”

Hecate puffs her cheeks out and sticks a tongue in one of them thoughtfully. “The veiled and out-of-sight stuff is what the truest believers seek.”

She steps closer to Demeter and parts her heavy robes as easily as if they were veils of silk. A ripple of power throbs from her and shakes the wintry goddess -- power of sky, sea, and earth, murmuring beneath the crone-flesh. For the first time in a long time, Demeter feels a thrill of fear. Her power over seasons is like a thin harness over this vast beast of might that lurks somewhere in Hecate’s past. 

“Why do you bother with incantations and charms?” She murmurs to the crone in front of her, while feeling the other two shapes closing in around her. “You have much more power than you let on. Enough to be a goddess of high standing, rather than lurking around with plonky spells.”

The delicate tip of a maiden’s tongue probes at Demeter’s clit, while a pregnant belly presses against her back as the mother’s hands begin to knead her small breasts. The crone presses her face to Demeter’s and kisses her. Between their open mouths, Hecate passes a small seed to her lover. Demeter feels the maiden thrust another seed up her cunt with her nimble little tongue. The mother presses a third into her palm.

Three pairs of arms draw the winter goddess into the circle, which has grown a thick carpet of purple orchids and black lilies while unattended. With what feels like three cunts pressed against her patrician lips, Demeter reaches blindly out and feels her fingers slide into tripled wetness. Three tongues take turns lapping between Demeter’s legs until she feels something inside her ineffable flame, not just the fake meat she wears out of habit, reach up and up and up … and for a moment, she forgets.

Then, among crushed dark petals, Hecate is again one body with three faces. “Why do I bother with spells and charms?” She asks thoughtfully, pooching out one cheek with her tongue again. “It’s subtler, for one. You and your foster family influence things in great bursts of light and thunderclaps. Hard to root out plots when you arrive in a blizzard wherever you go. Spells aren’t as impressive, but they can be a little more advantageous at ferreting out something that the gods want hidden.”

Hecate grins with all three insolent mouths.

“Or, rather, someone that the gods want hidden.”

Demeter cradles three rather sticky pomegranate seeds in her hand, and feels her old anger sweep back over her, but now with a novel tinge of purpose.

**Author's Note:**

> Hades players will no doubt be familiar, but just in case: "Kore" is one of the names of Persephone. 
> 
> The triple goddess concept can be a bit fast and loose, and sometimes Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate are designated as maiden, mother and crone aspects in some tellings.
> 
> Hecuba, wife of the King of Troy, is in some tellings turned into a dog when she curses Odysseus after being brought to him as a slave, or else goes mad and starts barking like a dog after seeing the corpses of her children.


End file.
